


Skinned knees and the fourth of july.

by orange_crushed



Series: Skinned knees 'verse. [1]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-16
Updated: 2011-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-18 03:28:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/184494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later it's Morocco, Alaska, France, Argentina, the moon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skinned knees and the fourth of july.

They meet in the candy shop between their houses. It is in the middle of the hill. He lives in a white house at the very top and his parents teach at the university; he smells like books and Vicks Vapo-Rub and the other boys hit him with sticks but he never complains, never fights back. Except somehow the other boys always end up in detention, cleaning the erasers, scrubbing the gym floor. Rose has seen him at school, writing into his tiny notebook and winding his watch, wearing his black eye like a badge.

"I'm going to Africa," he tells her, that first day. He's wearing a plastic helmet tied on with string, and carrying a book about lions. He looks nervous, like she's about to laugh. Instead she splits her licorice whip in half and hands it over.

"For the trip," she giggles, and he stares at her and chews with his mouth open. They read the book on the lawn in front of the library and he talks about sand and monkeys and zebras for an hour. Later it's Morocco, Alaska, France, Argentina, the moon. He draws a wobbly map of the solar system on a napkin at the counter of the soda shop, marking the earth with an x.

"We're always moving, did you know that ? Round and round and round and round." Rose glances down at his feet, kicking fast as he thinks and talks, thudding against the boards.

"You're always moving," she says. "Why not the earth ?"

Their school is in the middle, too, and he meets her at the gate in the morning. Rose ties her hair in braids and they thump her shoulders while she walks, keeping pace with his chatter. Rose lives at the very bottom of the hill, in a house that used to be white before it peeled. She is often hungry and today he unwraps his sandwich and splits it in half without asking. "I found a tire in the creek yesterday," she gushes, through the peanut butter and jam. "We could make a swing." His eyes light up and he draws plans on the back of her notebook for the rest of the afternoon, hiding it under his arm when the teacher passes.

He brings rope from his father's shed and they tie it at just the right point to launch themselves into the deepest current. Rose is first. She comes up sputtering and hollers for him to come in and later she has to drag him out and pound on his chest a couple of times.

"If we found four tires we could make a soapbox racer," he says, and they spend the rest of the week looking.

They aren't allowed to have sleepovers together and so he sneaks up to sit on the rickety ledge outside her window and talk about the space program and the dog the Russians just sent up. "That's going to be my dog when I get up there," he says, pointing. "I wonder if you can play fetch in different gravities." He's carried a four-hundred-dollar telescope through her neighborhood in the middle of the night and neither of them are paying any attention to it. "It can be your dog, too," he says, leaning over the windowsill. He does a funny thing with his eyebrows that he picked up from the hero in last week's matinee. It makes him look like a lovesick mime.

"I'd like that," says Rose.

After their final exams he stands up to Rudy Cunningham for cheating off of trembling, four-eyed Andy Baker and Rudy Cunningham decides to put his superior fists to use. Rose takes one look at him sprawled in the flowerbed and Rudy standing over him and swings her bookbag into the back of the taller boy. He falls forward on his face and yells bloody high-pitched murder. "The bigger they are, the harder they cry," says Rose, tossing her hair back. Rudy starts to stand up. "Uh-oh."

She feels a hand slip into hers and squeeze, and she squeezes it back.

"Run," he says, and they do.


End file.
